He starts singing along with himself a little bit here, but not enough so that it becomes bothersome. I’ve always thought of Jarrett as a somewhat fussy player, more concerned with baroque classical melodies than really gettin’ it pumpin’, but apparently back in the ’70s he could kick ass when he wanted to. Then there’s a brief passage of nothing but “little instruments” (shakers and tiny cymbals) before the piece gets rolling with a churning, surprisingly powerful piano solo. The title track is next, a ballad on which Jarrett’s piano is initially challenged by what sounds like a cuatro, a four-stringed guitar heard in salsa and other Latin music (it’s actually Jarrett himself, plucking the piano’s strings), plus percussion-in addition to the four members cited above, percussionist Danny Johnson is also present on this date. It’s a pretty ballistic first number, and it sets everything else up very nicely. The piece ends with Jarrett and Redman duetting on sax and musette, tackling that long, intricate melody with total precision. Meanwhile, Haden and Motian are going berserk in the back-Haden’s bass playing is as powerful as it was on Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction, and Motian is positively assaulting the kit, sounding almost like Max Roach at times the way he crushes the toms. Jarrett picks up a musette late in Redman’s solo spot and begins duetting with him. Redman’s tenor sax solo is full of honks and farts at the bottom of the instrument’s range, and at one point he even begins shouting through the reed, a fairly convincing display of abandon. It starts with “(If the) Misfits (Wear It),” a long and winding keyboard excursion that eventually gives way to a full-on rampage by the other three bandmembers. (The group also made three albums for Atlantic, one of which was a trio date without Redman, one for Columbia and two for ECM I have never heard any of those.)įort Yawuh is a double live album recorded at the Village Vanguard. What follows are my impressions of those eight albums, written as a kind of first-draft daily exercise. (All of this material is now available in a single eight-disc box get it from Amazon.) The first one covered 19, the second one covered 1975-77, and both included a bunch of bonus tracks. So I picked up the two boxes Impulse! devoted to that group’s output. But a while ago, I read this excellent interview that Ethan Iverson conducted with Jarrett, and it made me want to check out the ’70s American quartet ( Dewey Redman on sax, Charlie Haden on bass, Paul Motian on drums), a group I’d never gotten around to before then. I tried listening to some of the early “Standards Trio” recordings, but the humming, buzzing vocal thing he does became so distracting I couldn’t even hear the piano anymore-it was like trying to listen to music with a dragonfly zooming around my head. Considering the size of his discography and his prominence in the world of jazz, I haven’t really spent very much time at all listening to Keith Jarrett. I reviewed one of his solo discs for Jazziz back in 2006, and obviously I’ve heard his electric work with Miles Davis.
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